I have just been trying to programatically determine whether a DAT drive
has a tape loaded and is online. I thought I would try the online option of
devctrl, as in

        :devctrl.mpexl.telesup 7 nochange nochange online

I figured that this would do nothing if the drive was online and would give
an error if it wasn't. The first part is true, the second part isn't.
Devtool seems to hang if there is no tape loaded. Break and abort or
abortjob fixes it but that wasn't quite what I had in mind.

Any other ideas for checking the online or not state of a tape drive.


Tony Knowles     [log in to unmask]
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